The Guardian published the identity of the whistleblower on Sunday responsible for providing the paper with top-secret documents that revealed the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs. The paper wrote that it was revealing Edward Snowden’s identity at his request:

From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. ‘I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,’ he said.

The Guardian compared Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA technical assistant and current employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, to Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. “Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA,” Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras wrote.

The Powers That Be always need to remember that the truly moral person has limits to the evil they will tolerate.

Snowden, however, said there were differences. “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he told The Guardian. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

Which strongly implies there is a whole lot more, but it is even more sensitive…

Snowden’s identity revelation followed Greenwald’s appearance on ABC News’ “This Week,” where he told host George Stephanopoulos that the public should expect more revelations from him. Greenwald is the journalist responsible for breaking the bombshell story about the NSA secretly collecting phone data from millions of Verizon customers. Greenwald then raced the Washington Post to break the story about Prism, a program that allows the NSA to collect data from some of the country’s largest Internet companies (including AOL, HuffPost’s parent company).

After turning over the documents to The Guardian, Snowden fled to Hong Kong, where he sat for an interview with Greenwald and watched Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Snowden lived in Hawaii with his girlfriend, but told the UK paper that he was willing to give all of that up. He said:

OK, out of the country, likely in need of a new identity and living in a non-US influenced country. Bets on longevity? (I’d advise not having any risky hobbies like skiing or swimming….)

“I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

Kind of sums it all up… They are turning “White Hats” like me into “Black Hats” (from their point of view) and even their own employees are reaching a breaking point…

The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows

• Q&A with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I do not expect to see home again’

At least he knew what he was in for…

Interesting that they third party some of the dirty work to contractors:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

So Dell and Booz Allen are on the “worry list”…

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions,” but “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

Kind of sums it all up. Hell of a position to be in. Hard thing to do, to stand up to a police state in the making and say “This is not moral”. Now we just need about 100 Million more…

I don’t think it will happen, and doubt that this will be much more than a bump in the road for the push to tyranny (tyrants are particularly resistant to reason and never doubt themselves or their grasping after all possible power – it’s part of the character trait package…) But it is nice to see them getting a tiny bit of heartburn. Even if only for a little while.

I would offer to buy him a beer, but he ought not be accepting anything from strangers…

There’s a lot more in that interview. Well worth the read. As an insider, I think he is well positioned to know if:

71 Responses to True Morality is the Nightmare Of Despots

I admire Snowden’s character, but he sure walked far out on the gang plank.
I hope there is such a grown swell of people demanding his release that his life is not ruined.
I would love to think this will get a Supreme Court hearing, then again I’m not sure they they would rule properly, many of there recent ruling are a bit unnerving.
Yes, we live in interesting times.

I question the outcome of the election.
1) Harassment of conservative groups through the IRS.
2) Voting machines that always seemed to vote Democrat
3) Vote counts in key precincts of 110% or more of registered voters
4) The voting qualifications not accurate. A lot of Felons and dead people voted.
5) Voters caught voting multiple times.
6) Media one sided, buries every bad story by Obama.

Ok, Maybe it is me. So perhaps some of your readers can help me with this conundrum.

I think Snowden was outstanding. Ellsberg not so much. I do not see where that was really an internal issue, although it had internal implications. But Manning? That was pure self indulgence! What exactly did it reveal? Not that the government was spying on its citizens (ala Snowden), but that it was spying on foreign countries (big surprise there). In other words, Manning was completely self serving with no national redeeming value. He gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the nation. Now, you may not like this country. And you may cheer him for that. But I fail to see how that was anything more than a spying case.

Like I said, maybe it is just me. I put Snowden on a pedestal. He was thinking about the people of his nation. The other 2? One not so much (merely exposing obfuscations of the war by the Pentagon), and one not at all (what did Manning’s leak tell us? That Julian Assange is a rapist. Big whoop).

It is certain that evil, authoritarian regimes spy on their own folks. So do nice democratic ones.It’s a nasty world. We expect the nice democratic regimes to have safeguards in place to prevent abuses, and when the inevitable abuses do occur to address them promptly.So it boils down to trust: do you trust the leaders of the government to be running the show in service of a common ideal and with reasonable trustworthiness and honesty, or are they arrogant pond slime corrupted by power and contemptuous of the citizenry who have found the mechanisms of control to tempting to let lie.
With literally millions in government,that’s probably a broad brush improper to use generally, so we have to pick a few elected, appointed, or self proclaimed leaders who have to (and volunteered to) either benefit from the successes or suffer for the sins of their party and agency.
Our current ruling group wouldn’t want me on their jury.

Breaking: Obama campaign caught in major NC vote fraud scheme
North Carolina’s Civitas Institute has revealed that the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the Obama campaign conspired to register at least 11,000 people via the internet in violation of state law. This has been confirmed through records requests filed with all of North Carolina’s 100 counties. The counting is not yet complete.
North Carolina does not allow online voting, but according to Civitas, SBE staff authorized an Obama campaign website, Gottaregister.com, to use a web-based registration program…..

@Gail Combs – If You read Snopes they will call it untrue, but I don’t believe anything out of Snopes. A Google search will point to a lot of stories in various papers. I know people in Ohio that are furious about the election.

@BobN – Snopes does not print things injurious to liberals, and lies about a lot else. Search Cardinal Bergoglio on truthorfiction and snopes. You will find an honest answer on the former, and pure opinion on the latter. That is but one example of the bias of snopes.

“New Element Discovered The CSIRO announced the discovery of a perverse, perplexing atom.

The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 3-6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

Deception about nuclear physics and the workings of the Sun began in 1946.

George Orwell moved from London to Jura to start writing his warning to the public that same year.

1984 arrived on schedule. In 1983 Nature published a news report on the demise of dogma on the formation of the solar system, but then began blocking publications that showed the Sun itself made our elements and then birthed the solar system five billion years ago.

When I get access to the web, I will post a link to the 1983 report in Nature.

He substituted his version of what is right, over the considered view of thousands of national security professionals over more than three decades. Government can obtain phone call records without notice and without a warrant since 1979. Surprised? Get over it. You have zero privacy in what number you called, when, and how long you were connected.

He has notified terrorists and other criminals that they can be monitored. Thanks a lot.

He broke several laws by his release of the information.

He may think he is smart, and can hide in foreign countries. He may even create a groundswell of misguided support, so that any punishment or death penalty would make him a martyr. He should think again. If he has family, they should be very worried. He will likely stay alive, but see family and girlfriend die from accidental causes.

This is not how it works in the US. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that there is no privacy in the number dialed, one lone wolf does not get to change that all because he thinks it is wrong.

We are a nation of laws. We have mechanisms in place to change a law if it needs changing. Snowden is not a hero.

@ Jason Calley, I see it as sober reality. Several key people died of accidents during the Clinton reign, and a gunship of Seals died shortly after Bin Laden was killed, during the current administration.

We have organization like CAIR who receive money from foreign states and who also send money overseas to doubtful “charities.” Banks have assisted US law enforcement in tracking funding from foreign states for activism in this country, and it would be a fool’s errand to think that it is not helpful to use surveillance in keeping the nation safe.

But at this point, intelligence gathering is really being aimed at the citizens of this country who do not even have a rap sheet, let alone a connection to foreign combatants, and all of one’s personal business may be carried out on the computer – which is not true of the telephone.

I have never, ever believed the super computers being set up (with help from the Chinese) are really going to be used as climate models. These super computers such as Kraken, Gaea, and Hestia are easily big enough to keep files on every human on this planet.

Roger, either I totally misunderstand you or you misunderstand me. Or maybe we both misunderstand the other.

I very much agree that his family and friends are in danger — especially he, himself. They are all very likely to soon be dead (or worse). That is exactly why we are NOT a nation of laws. If we were a nation of laws it would be inconceivable that friends and family would be killed as retribution against lawbreakers. All indications — including the information recently leaked — indicate that we are being ruled by sociopaths.

Still, perhaps I am confused. Please explain how you can say:
“If he has family, they should be very worried. He will likely stay alive, but see family and girlfriend die from accidental causes. (snip) We are a nation of laws.”

A contributor on Fox News today suggested that Snowden may have made a really bad choice in territory (Chinese) to run to. He opined that the Chinese government might be extremely interested in interrogating a known NSA operative (who they can easily prevent from leaving Hong Kong) with much less finesse than many western governments typically use.

On second thought, I am terrified that a person of this set of credentials, and this limited experience, and working for a contractor, can get a high security clearance. Prima Facia evidence that the program needs serious management review if nothing else.

if you think the terrorists did not already know this, what rock have you been under? We caught bin Laden, NOT by any phone records as they had abandoned that method since Tora Bora. They were using couriers and it was old fashion shoe leather that caught them.

Now, you might be able to pick up a Tamerlan Tsarnaev (yea, that snooping by the feds worked real well in that case) via snooping on phone records, but not a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And while the records have been obtainable since 1979, it still requires a search warrant. Which means the government has to have suspicion that a reasonable judge would agree with. However, that is no longer the case as the FISA courts are basically sock puppets for the government. It is all done in secret like a Kangaroo court.

No, what Snowden (not snowmen) did was air the dirty laundry in public. He made sure that a lot of people knew what was going on. Perhaps enough to change the law. Perhaps not. But he did not compromise any security. The bad guys know a lot more about what our spy agencies are doing than the Average American Joe.

@philjourdan, sorry, we apparently disagree over basic facts of phone record collection. I refer to the US Supreme Court case of Smith v Maryland, 422 US 735 (1979). No warrant was sought by police to obtain the phone records, and the Court agreed that no warrant is required.

@ Roger Sowell – The government had all this data and warnings from Russia and could not connect the dots. They are a big bureaucracy that wouldn’t know a terrorist if they stumbled over it. I would rather take my chances than give u my freedoms.
There are more effective ways of getting the job done. Quite letting Muslims in to the country, Shut down the illegal entries and profile those likely, that would work way more than spying on everyone. Our government is out of control.

The Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) ruling left it up to Statutory law, which the 1986 act then put into law. The Patriot Act did not change that requirement, it merely defined what exactly a Pen Registry entailed.

So yes, we do disagree. I slightly misspoke when I said search warrant. It is a court order. Similar, but the burden of proof is less for the latter.

It’s an interesting question. When does national security trump individual privacy rights? Or, restated, how many more 9-11 events will Americans tolerate before the clamor is “DO something!!”

The answer is one. But the real question is “who”. While I am very familiar with the popular blame game the media loves to play when a Republican is in office, I have to ask – how much of that “demand” is really the people, and how much is manufactured.

The problem is the Low Information voters. An apt term. it does not refer to stupid people (necessarily), just people who do not seem to care that their freedoms are being lost as long as it does not affect them. They are totally ignorant of Martin Niemoeller for the most part.

In support of BobN, even the most totalitarian governments have failed to protect their citizens 100% from acts of terrorism. the old USSR had its terrorists (they only could do it ONCE before being killed, but they adapted with suicide bombers). So trading freedom for security is as Franklin said. They will have neither.

Despite the current demise of this country, I believe we will once again be able to rejoice, rather than weep, in comparing reality with the great expectations that Thomas Jefferson expressed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen United Statis of America !

2. The invasion of privacy is a desperate attempt to hide a decision to use human engineering to save life on Earth from Hiroshima-like annihilation of 6 Aug 1945 by:

A. Forming the UN on 24 Oct 1945
B. Ending national boundaries and constitutions
C. Compromising the integrity of science by promoting misinformation on
_ a.) The composition and source of energy* in the core of the Sun.
_ b.) The composition and source of energy* in cores</i of U and Pu atoms.

That source of energy* – neutron repulsion – is the Creator, Destroyer and Preserver of every atom, life and world. I.e., World leaders embarked on a mission that was doomed to fail from the start !

They cannot succeed. They are afraid to admit their wrongs. There will be no winners – only losers – until rigorous honesty restores integrity to government science and constitutional limits on governments.

We can, in fact, rejoice now that we are about to witness an epic re-enactment of the battle of life.

Precise experimental measurements and observations from the space age almost exposed and defeat this deception thirty years ago, in 1983. See this 1983 News Report on “The demise of established dogmas on the formation of the Solar System,” Nature303 (1983) 286: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Demise_of_Solar_Dogma.pdf

Data from the 1995 Galileo probe of Jupiter again falsified the SSM (Standard Solar Model) of a hydrogen-filled Sun. This CSPAN news video recording of NASA belatedly releasing Jupiter data in 1998 illustrates the physical impossibility of sustaining a falsehood with political power:

It’s an interesting question. When does national security trump individual privacy rights? Or, restated, how many more 9-11 events will Americans tolerate before the clamor is “DO something!!”

I’m sure the terrorists are laughing themselves silly at Americans’ outrage over a few phone calls….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No the terrorists are laughing themselves silly as Janet Napolitano leaves our southern border WIDE OPEN.

She refused to build the border fence required BY LAW. She also reduced the number of border guards. State national guard units in border states were called up and sent overseas and when private citizen groups stepped in to help beef-up surveillance (a la neighborhood watch on steroids) and reported their findings to the border patrols, Napolitano responded by giving the Mexicans their exact positions! Oh and don’t forget Fast and Furious where the US government supplied Mexican criminals with over two thousand firearms including AK-47-type rifles.

No what were you saying about the NEED to spy on US citizens when the US government doesn’t give a crap about protecting our most vulnerable border?

A list of REFERENCES (some quite old so may be stale) and a couple of paragraphs from each are in this comment here.

I do wonder if I could walk away from $200k / year and a house in Hawaii on a matter of principle.

On The One Hand: I really think that it is wrong for the government to be collecting a nice fat archive of phone call meta-data and content along with ALL the twitters and tweets and email they can, so that they can dredge through it whenever they want.

OTOH: As the “mail guy” at a few companies I had full access to ALL email and ALL voicemail. (It was a technical fact of life. Somebody had to own the machine, so if you “have root” you have access. By definition.) I always considered it one of THE most important duties I had to treat privacy with respect, even though there was NOTHING technical preventing me from looking at any of it. So to some extent Snowden is just complaining that he was being trusted with root access to the mail archives of many servers. That was part of my job (on a smaller single company basis) for most of my professional life. So I really wonder why he found it unusual.

Essentially, were I given “His old job”, it would be exactly the same pattern of authority and access as I had at most of the companies where I worked for decades; just on a larger scale. I’m pretty sure I’d grouse about the volume of data being collected, mostly under my breath to myself, but maybe to a selected workmate IFF they initiated the complaint; and then just accept that “It was my duty” and do my job. Maybe I’ve been in contracting too long. You just accept the “house rules” of the Client and “do what’s in the contract”. Nothing else honors the contract and the client.

Frankly, I think that’s part of what bothers me most about this story. That I could easily see me doing his job, and I’m pretty sure I could not take the story public, while being fully aware that such data gathering is “government over reach”. It violates my “respect for the contract and client” ethic too much (not to mention violating the law… another place where I’m too ‘duty bound’… ) Yet I’d be knowing that what was being done was immoral. I’m not sure I like what that says about me. Oddly, I’d have the same conundrum if I found myself working for the Mafia making, say, a financial database to track their drug profits in money laundered off shore accounts. There’s a “Client Privacy / Privilege” or “Client Confidentiality” that I just hold inviolate. (I “took flack” on the “Why I like Arabs” thread for this same point, really. When someone trusts me with a confidence, I am simply obligated to not violate that trust. For anyone. It’s a fundamental property.) So were I in his job, I’d simply “cash the check and shut up”. I’d have given my word via the contract that things were secret, so that’s how they would stay.

But it’s wrong. ;-)

@O.Manuel:

Unfortunately, I’ve observed that most folks are not very moral… and the percentage has been dropping over the decades…

@Dearieme &BobN:

The Democrats and especially those in Chicago, have been using “dirty tricks” for decades to win elections. “Vote early and vote often” is a known slogan about Chicago style politics. There is a reason that ANY attempt to put “one person only one vote really and we will audit it” into force gets fought tooth and nail… and anything that lets folks register a few times in different places and vote several times gets promoted. It wins them elections.

Add in the history of folks (like Hillary where some “lost” FBI files “mysteriously” were found in her office just at an opportune time…) using government gathered data for political gain… well, it’s not very nice…

@PhilJourdan:

Well, just to put some salt on things…

It’s also possible that this is a clandestine operation to get a plant inside China. Just having a guy who can document what city he was taken to, what people he talked with, how their agency operated, etc. can be worth a fair amount.

Part of why I didn’t go into the Spy Business. Too many “games inside games”. (Well, that, and they didn’t call me back when I sent in my resume ;-) Yes, I applied to the CIA and NSA at one time or other. Just after 9/11 and they were up to their eyeballs in resumes… or so I like to tell myself ;-)

@Jason Calley:

If you parse what is being said carefully, it looks like they are making a very careful distinction between collecting the data and use of the data. The denials are about “listening” to phone content, not about “collecting”…

IMHO, they are attempting to “collect” everything possible into a major data center / info gathering location. Then the barrier to “use” is just a court order / legal approval. IMHO, Snowden was complaining that the data is all being gathered and he had technical access; while TPTB are saying the use is limited to foreigners and only after a court rules (i.e. Snowden was told “track & review everything on Mohammed Foo, and don’t look at all the other stuff you can technically see.”) Doing anything else just does not make a lot of sense.

The phone switches don’t know who is going to be of interest in the future. The email and voice mail servers can’t know what messages will be important in the future. Etc. So the rational approach is “gather an store it all, sort it out later”.

@L.G.:
Cute, very cute ;-)

@O.Manuel:

If you assume that the folks in greatest positions of power got there via a personality trait that demands political manipulation, lying, and grasping after power (directly and via indirect manipulation of others) with a significant “ego problem” and belief that as the “rule makers” they are above the rules (making them…); then it all “fits”…

The implication is that this select group will NOT let “self organizing systems” (such as democracy) just happen, undirected and uncontrolled. The corollary is that any large “movement” is directed… AGW is a large “movement”, so must be “directed” by those in power. It isn’t an accident, it’s a planned project.

A direct successor and outgrowth of their earlier foray into the field of “computer projection” and FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) in “The Limits To Growth” by Meadows et. al.

@Adolfo:

ANOTHER 1 1/2 hour video? I don’t have time to audit that to make sure it’s “reasonable”…

If somebody can watch that and let me know if there’s anything to offensive in it, that would be a help…

BTW, it’s a false conjoining to presume that “coming to light” means “brought to justice”. First off, almost 1/2 of the population is of “below average intelligence”. Most of them don’t know, nor care, even if it is on the nightly news. Secondly, of the 1/2 that are “average or above”; most of them are busy, distracted, or part of the system and also don’t care. Many folks are in favor of a “strong government” and “better security”. In the end, it’s only about 30% who really give a damn on most things, and even they are usually split near the middle.

Most of the time, about 10% of the people determine what happens.

So “bring to light” for the other 70% to 90% mostly means they are annoyed that you interrupted the football game… I don’t think anything short of Global Thermonuclear War will dethrone the families in power today; and even that’s a bit “iffy”…

@Richard Ilfeld:

Power corrupts. It does not matter what the political point of view nor the “trust” due to government. Once the power level is too large, it is corrupt power. That’s why limited government is so important. (And, I might add, limited wealth. Yes, we need wealthy people, but not several orders of magnitude more than everyone else…)

So I don’t trust any agency with too much power…

@Adolfo:

Now that’s fascinating….

@Gail & BobN:

Pretty much… What gets me is that the Republicans don’t try to stop it. I’m torn between thinking them idiots and thinking they are doing it too, just better at it so not being caught with dirty fingers…

@Roger Sowell:

I never “get over it” when something wrong is made legal. I accept it, but never “get over it”…

@Jason Calley & Roger Sowell:

It isn’t “double think” (though it looks like it).

We are a nation of laws in our aspirations.
We have a reality to the contrary as we work toward our aspirations.

Like the constitution saying “All men are created equal” then counting some as fractions of others and leaving out women entirely. It’s an aspirational thing we’ve been working on for generations… Same rights, just a “current reality” to deal with as well…

@Lynn Clark:

The Asians are very good at finding “weakness” and exploiting it. Even just folks being offered jobs can have sex partners, luxury goods, money and more used to entice. Add in a person who can’t go to 192? or some such other countries… you end up with a pretty strong inducement… Then, if that doesn’t work, they have more painful methods that make ours look quaint and primitive. Do not underestimate them. (Though I did see in the news a statement that he might be looking at Iceland… No idea why.)

Then there’s the potential that this is a very elaborate fishing expedition by our TLA’s (Three Letter Agencies) to find out more about their TLAs… (Unlikely, but possible).

@Richard Ilfeld:

Security clearance is based on what you have NOT done. It’s easier to get with a short empty record. (Several college friends got security clearances “fresh out of school”. One to work on nuclear bombs, another with secret electronics…) The job he was doing looks to me like a low skill text searching job. Clearance is not dependent on your intelligence, just on following orders and not having “issues” in your past. Yes, you ought to be worried by that…

@PhilJourdan:

Well, SOME of the are more clueful, but some are pretty dumb. We catch the dumb ones with this kind of thing.

Personally, I find the obvious failures to find a lot of folks via this kind of snooping to be a comfort. It shows that even this system, highly touted, is pretty well fouled up. Pretty darned incompetent, so not all that big a threat to the Average Joe and Jane… Heck, it bugs me; yet mostly over the fact that I know all the text messages of complete CRAP sent to me on the cell phone are adding to the cost of the nation. ( A typical exchange is something like “Get milk” “Can’t you get it?” “Busy” “OK, send the kid”. “The kid is at work.” “OK…” ) Just a massive waste.

@Roger Sowell:

The “bad guys” are male Muslims, typically over 18 and below 50 years old. Especially those that have traveled out of the country to specific places (and their associates) and / or those that attend particular mosques. The “bad guys” are not Christian women, nor high school kids in Iowa… It’s pretty darned easy to figure out where to focus a search once one takes off the P.C. Blinders. There is NO need to suck up 90%+ of the data being collected.

@PhilJourdan:

Pretty much…

There’s a Muslim Axis attacking the traditional American ideals of freedom and liberty AND an institutional assault on those same liberties and freedoms (and privacy) by a power hungry group bent on control; and using the first group as an excuse…

Do they realize this? Is it “by design”? Or just ignorance mixed with self aggrandizement? I don’t know; but also fail to see where that really matters…

@All……just “follow the money”: Whenever and wherever something must be “protected” from others, it is just for money&power, and most probably not my money/ power or your money/power, as we live simple lives and we are neither fool or crazy or think ourselves immortal beings, it is always about THEIR power/money. It´s a pathology which clearly reveals great fears and monstrous inferiority complexes, in need of unceasing and unending “protection”. Graphically we can describe it as they feeling continuously drowning in a sucking vortex, a black hole of nothingness, which only can be slowed or retarded by getting more and more money and more and more “power”, so supposedly getting an every time a shorter “peace” living. Of course, they have “sacrificed” “care” for anybody but for them only. Let us pray for them!

A counter-point. Privacy may be the last thing a free society really wants. An example:

Using a cell phone, and frequently, establishes a person’s approximate location and the time at that location. This can be, and is being, used to establish an alibi defense. I have many friends who routinely use the “check in” feature on their phone.

Additionally, texting, emails, and other digitally recorded communications establish an excellent rebuttal to hearsay testimony, or false testimony.

I have been the subject of a mistaken identity criminal investigation, many years before cell phones. Posting to FaceBook, LinkedIn, or texting, tweeting, sending an email, even placing a phone call over the cellular system could have easily established my innocence, had that technology existed back then. As it turned out, I had credible eyewitnesses to confirm my alibi, so it was mistaken identity.

The Internet technology and digital archiving are not 100 percent bad.

As some free legal advice, it is always a good idea to wear distinctive clothing, talk to people in hotels and restaurants, and use a cell phone regularly when one is traveling alone. The goal is to be able to produce a credible alibi defense, if that ever becomes necessary.

@ World leaders embarked on a mission in 1945 that was doomed to fail….Not at all! instead you should have said: Bad and silly grown up kids embarked on a stupid mission, more than two thousand years ago, to become, at least, equal to the rest of people, and from 1945 on they became each day more convinced they, as suspected by the more intelligent among them, failed.
Take it easy kids! ….at least you won´t have to worry anymore about not being what you were from the beginning, and that´s a lot.

Please. THE GUARDIAN? The Guardian suddenly rages against the machine? Lands a journalistic scoop? Give me a break. The hero gay reporter with his partner living in Brazil because they, sob, can’t marry in the US! What a comedy.

One of Snowden’s colleagues was the son of Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The question is what does the Deep State want to achieve with it, I guess it is time for them to dismantle the Obama myth so the next prez can be seen as the saviour again. The usual timeline. You want to destroy the myth of the current prez during his second term so the crowd craves the next crisis actor installed as prez.

…. What gets me is that the Republicans don’t try to stop it. I’m torn between thinking them idiots and thinking they are doing it too….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
EM the Republicans are the ‘Controlled Opposition’ That is why the MSM attacked the Tea Party so hard. The Findings from the Blair*-Rockefeller poll were Tea Party Distinguished by Racial Views and Fear of the Future. This very RIGGED poll was trumpeted all over the news. No one bothered to mention most of the ‘Racist’ comments started with ” Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government…”

For example:

#1 Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that minorities have job equality with Whites, even if it means you will have to pay more taxes?

#2. Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that minorities have schools equal in quality to Whites, even if it means you have to pay more taxes?

#3. Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that minorities have health care services equal to Whites, even if it means you have to pay more taxes?

#4. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: We have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country?….

You can see how answers to those questions by people who are not racist but want smaller government comes up as “Oh my goodness they are RACIST!”

* Dianne Blair Center…, University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service
With a name like that you KNOW the poll will be rigged.

“The question is what does the Deep State want to achieve with it, I guess it is time for them to dismantle the Obama myth…” ~DirkH

It has been pointed out that Hillary Clinton often comes out looking exceedingly good in these leaks. She has also began fundraising for a 2016 bid. She “needs” 100 million.

It is possible that this is a massive re-direct. The implementation of Obamacare is upon us, and Sebelius has been caught “raising funds” from insurance cos. to cover more costs of Obamacare. This is illegal and ethically wrong because these are the industries she will be regulating; health exchanges will regulate insurance cos and doctors to determine what treatments are available. The IRS is also going to be used to enforce Obamacare. And the IRS has recently targeted political enemies of the WH.

Or the whole story of the IRS targeting and the NSA intelligence on emails amounts to a threat: the government is reminding everyone that they have all of this information about you, and your taxes. It may be for a “chilling” effect.

And Gail is absolutely correct. The Republican Party has actually also been discussing “culling” the conservative candidates out of elections to streamline the “electable” candidates through the process.

Obviously, two party systems in which the parties do not differ from the Progressives on energy or health care has already been accomplished in Australia, Canada, and the UK. The road to a viable Independence Party is being blazed by the UKIP, but you can see that the rise from a 2-3% support level only gives a close election away to the most outrageously liberal candidate. So you are condemned by your own party for not supporting their “electable” candidate, and told that you “are voting for the opposition.” Nigel Farage and the UKIP had support up into the 20’s the last election. That is excellent progress. We may as well accept this and get ready for the long road to 25% support as a third party in a two-party system.

Someone at another blog has a brother who worked for the EPA. His brother was told to leave the ‘big boys’ alone and go after the Mom & Pop companies. This true throughout the bureaucracy because the ‘big boys’ have their employees (former and future) running the d@m bureaucracies.

And this was also another tool of government harassment of small businesses. There is no reason whatsoever for a “federal appeals court to issue a controversial ruling that patent holders could face fines of up to $500 for every product sold with a so-called false patent mark, such as an expired patent date.”

Oct. 28, 2010 (United Press International) — U.S. attorneys are having a field day with a law that allows anyone to sue a business that keeps a patent number on a product too long, an attorney said.

With the recent change in the law allowing anyone to sue and collect half the fine for themselves, “Anyone can look at a product and see if it has an expired patent number and can sue. It’s caused the opening of the floodgates,” said patent attorney Tom Bejin at Radar Fishman & Grauer, a Michigan firm, the Detroit Free Press reported Thursday.

“The economic incentive went from zero to 60 in three seconds,” Bejin said.

Another attorney, Robert Brandenburg of the firm Brooks Kushman said, “You have opportunistic attorneys who basically just troll for people who’ve left a patent number on a product.”

The recent change has left Sal Herman, the founder of Holdup Suspender, to spend $30,000 hiring workers to grind expired patent numbers off of metal clips that keep suspenders from slipping off of pants.”

World leaders behave as despots because they are frightened. The global climate scam has already been exposed as fraudulent science. Four other consensus models – built on Fred Hoyle’s 1946 papers [1] to obscure the Sun’s energy – are also in danger of collapse:

o BBM (Big Bang Model) of sudden hydrogen at the birth of the universe,
o SSM (Standard Solar Model) of hydrogen-filled stars heated by H-fusion,
o Models of neutron stars as dead nuclear embers of burned out stars, and
o The BHM (Black Hole Model) for storing these imaginary end products.

Searches on DuckDuckGo – a search engine that does not track customer activity – is up dramatically this week!
Also, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is giving people info about alternatives to the current tracking browsers, email services, video, photos, plug-ins, etc – see below

Apologies if you’ve already written about this. Because of the NSA revelations and some of your recent posts about internet privacy I am now running a Tor proxy on my iMac. I’ve been like a junkyard dog about my personal privacy for a number of years now and it really pisses me off to learn about the extent to which our oh-so-benevolent government is spying on us.

Frightened world leaders are as dangerous and unpredictable as any other cornered animal !

I would like to help society, but it is almost impossible for me to communicate how an abrupt U-turn in solar science in 1946 laid the foundation for consensus models that prevented human understanding of the Sun – the Creator, Destroyer and Sustainer of every atom, life and world in the solar system. That abrupt U-turn in solar science in 1946 is the root of the current demise of modern science and society.

Here’s the promised link to the 1983 news report in Nature on “The demise of established dogmas on the formation of the solar system.”

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.

What is the chance that the NSA can access enough bandwidth to actually TRANSMIT ALL the com to their multiple data centers for later transfer to the Utah Data Center??? Do we really have that much excess bandwidth installed??

I have no idea, but, unless several companies went broke installing mucho excess bandwidth my guess would be no. Am open to education here.

Adding intelligent taps to major routers and exchanges would seem to be what has been the methods in the past and would seem to be the continuing rational choice to filter the data before transmitting unless there really is that excess bandwidth!!

Snowden was up to about 120,000 at the subcontractor to the NSA. The 200,000 is said to be a mistake. The girlfriend appears to be a bubble head to be kind. Would appear he was not particularly close to friends and family.

As in the hey day of the soviets I always get really sceptical when someone runs directly to people who are WORSE at something to denounce the US for doing that something!! It also seemed to coincide with the little summit Barry had with the Chinese head to hassle him about hacking US sites for Military and Business secrets. Too many odd points for me to be calling him a hero just yet.

The BS about his family being in danger I really need some evidence that the US gubmint has done that in the past. Yes there are rumors about both Clintoon and Barry having bodies stacked, but, that is not Federal Gubmint policy so much as criminals who have attained office.

just to keep it clear in my mind, what you are saying is that LamdaRail IS carrying a data stream that equals ALL traffic in the US and much of the rest of the world in addition to whatever it is carrying for customers, and when the Utah Data Center is complete will be forwarding it all to that point over two links to Ogden Utah??

@kuhnKat – it can. I do not know if it is. But it was designed and built to relieve the congestion of the Internet, so its pipes are huge. And it only is available to Government (feds) and Universities. If they want to move massive amounts of data, that is the way to go.

And they would compress it. There is a lot of white space in internet traffic.

@KuhnKat – no, I have no idea if the Universities know WHAT is being sent on the 100gb pipes. They built it and restricted it. The government is using it (Universities have not been able to ween themselves from the regular internet because of commerce).

I can believe that the Universities involved in the project do not know what the gubmint puts on it. Of course, they are part of the very best trough feeders and are leif to do anything to lose that position. To ask questions is to lose their place so they ignore the gas chambers, er, whatever.the gubmint is doing with whatever it is they have whenever it is they have it.

Thanks for the intriguing quote from Cayce Reading 3976-29 (June 22, 1944). Fear and loathing of the force of destruction, first seen in July 1945, have prevented world leaders and their science advisors from realizing the benevolence of the force of creation and preservation of life.

The force of creation that endowed mankind with inalienable rights (1776 Declaration of Independence)

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